EVENTS

Yesterday, I pointed out that even if one takes the birthers’ highly implausible claim that Obama was born in Kenya at face value, Title 8, section 1401, subsection (g) of the U.S. Code seems to grant him natural born status since his mother was a citizen who lived in the US for at least five years, at least two of which were after the age of fourteen.[Read more…]

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I was vaguely aware during the election that some people were questioning Obama’s eligibility for the presidency because of his Kenyan father, just as others were questioning McCain’s because he was born in Panama. Neither candidate made an issue out of the other’s birth and I assumed that this issue would die down after the election.[Read more…]

In fact, the French system is similar enough to the U.S. model that reforms based on France’s experience might work in America. The French can choose their doctors and see any specialist they want. Doctors in France, many of whom are self-employed, are free to prescribe any care they deem medically necessary. “The French approach suggests it is possible to solve the problem of financing universal coverage…[without] reorganizing the entire system,” says Victor G. Rodwin, professor of health policy and management at New York University.
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France also demonstrates that you can deliver stellar results with this mix of public and private financing. In a recent World Health Organization health-care ranking, France came in first, while the U.S. scored 37th, slightly better than Cuba and one notch above Slovenia. France’s infant death rate is 3.9 per 1,000 live births, compared with 7 in the U.S., and average life expectancy is 79.4 years, two years more than in the U.S. The country has far more hospital beds and doctors per capita than America, and far lower rates of death from diabetes and heart disease. The difference in deaths from respiratory disease, an often preventable form of mortality, is particularly striking: 31.2 per 100,000 people in France, vs. 61.5 per 100,000 in the U.S. (my italics)

PBS’s Frontline had a programSick Around the World that looked at the health care systems in England, Taiwan, Germany, Switzerland, and Japan.

The private, profit-seeking health industry knows that their system is terrible compared to what single payer or socialized systems can offer and so they have to obscure and confuse things as much as possible. What has been amusing to watch has been the logical knots that the health industry has been tying itself up in to avoid even the minimal public option that has been proposed, saying that it would drive them out of business. Of course, if their claims that the government cannot run anything properly, that the private sector is far more efficient and will provide better health care at lower cost, then they should not have anything to fear from a public option. Even president Obama, who has been trying to placate the private health insurance industry, found this argument a bit much, saying, “Why would it drive private insurers out of business? If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality healthcare, if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the government — which they say can’t run anything — suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.”

The fact that they are trying to prevent a public option shows that the opposite is true. What they really fear is that once you take the profits, the huge salaries and bonuses of their top executives, and their exorbitant bureaucratic costs out of the system, the public system will be cheaper and more efficient and people will flock to it. Because of this fear, they and their lobbyists will first try to prevent any discussion at all of a meaningful public option, such as single payer.

If forced to concede one, they will try to hobble it by either limiting access to it or put in a lot of restrictions and rules in order to make is as inefficient and expensive and callous as the private system. “Opponents say private insurers could not compete with a public plan that didn’t have to make a profit. They argue that private health plans would end up going out of business, leaving only an entirely government-run health care system.”

I sincerely hope that this is true. Profit-making entities have no business being in the position of making health care decisions.

What the industry would really like is for the government to mandate that everyone have private insurance and pay for it, and at the same time reserve the right to deny coverage so that they make more profits. Because of this, we should be aware that the public plan that finally emerges from Congress may not be that good because of the amount of money that the health industry funnels to members of Congress. They may try to fob off on us some lousy system that they label the ‘public option’ that is designed to fail.

We should keep pushing for a single-payer, Medicare-for-all type system. The group Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) has done wonderful work in pushing for single payer and has created a comparison chart of public option vs. single payer. Single Payer Action Network in Ohio (SPAN Ohio) has come up with a plan just for the state that has the following features:

Patients get free choice of health care providers and hospitals.

When you go to your own personal physician for visits, there are NO premiums, NO co-payments, NO deductibles, NO one excluded. You pay nothing.

When you get your prescription filled by your pharmacist, there are NO premiums, NO co-payments, NO deductibles, NO one excluded. You pay nothing.

If you need hospitalization, there are NO premiums, NO co-payments, NO deductibles, NO one excluded. You pay nothing.

It beats me why anyone would prefer the current bureaucratic, service denying nightmare of the private, employer-based, profit-seeking system over such a plan.

POST SCRIPT: Tom Tomorrow on health care

One of my favorite cartoonists has been on a tear recently with three strips on health care: one, two, and three.

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When it comes to new communication technology, I can be labeled as both an ‘early adopter’ and and ‘early abandoner’. I got a Facebook account very early on, and now don’t do anything with it. I similarly got a Twitter account and abandoned it. I finally broke down and got a cell phone a couple of months ago under pressure from my family after I was in a few situations where having it would have been really helpful, but I use it only for emergencies and have given out the number to just a handful of people. In the three months since I got it, I have received about three real calls and a half dozen wrong numbers, which suits me just fine.

I think it is already pretty clear that I am a bit slow when it comes to new technology, adopting new things only when I absolutely have to. It is not that I am pathologically averse to new technology. It is just that so many new things come along that I prefer to wait until I feel that it serves a real need before I put in the time to learn the new tool. For example, I was quite happy with a pocket diary to keep track of my appointments until I got in a position where other people needed to make appointments on my behalf. Then I got a PDA (first a Palm and now an iTouch) so that I can sync with an online calendar that others have access to.

The only thing that I adopted fairly early and stuck with is my blog.

All this leads me to the topic of new book forms. I did listen to an audiobook a couple of times when I was driving long distance and it was not bad but the books that I listened to on it were lightweight humor. I usually read more serious non-fiction and that requires me to go back and re-read portions or jump to the index to find related things and audiobooks don’t seem to be suited to that. Even with fiction I like to flip back to refer to earlier points and you can’t do that easily with an audiobook.

Now we have eBooks. I tried out a Kindle that was loaned to me a few months ago (before the new version came out) because my university is embarking on an trial run to see if they might be good for students to use, so that they can have all their books in one portable device and not have to lug heavy textbooks around. My experience did not convince me enough to buy my own.

There are some good features to the Kindle. The screen was easy to read. You can also change the font size. Purchasing a book and downloading it from Amazon was very quick. Because it is small, about the size of a normal book, and yet has so much capacity, you can basically carry your entire library with you wherever you go.

But the reading experience was not as much fun as I would have liked, though some people really love it. There were also disadvantages. You cannot flip though the book easily, or jump to a page. I was reading Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin about how much of the human body originates from our fish ancestors and the book has lots of figures that are important in understanding how organisms evolved. The figures were hard to see and the labels impossible to read, and could not be enlarged, making it pretty much useless. The newest Kindle has a bigger screen that seems to partially solve this particular problem.

On balance, I did not like the Kindle. I prefer the tactile feel of a real book. After I returned the Kindle, I bought a hardcopy version of Your Inner Fish and enjoyed it much more.

Furthermore, with the Kindle you cannot lend a single book to someone without lending your entire library. This is a real drawback. There are many books that I have bought after I was first loaned a copy by someone who felt I would like it, and I have lent books to people as well. Furthermore, this will dry up the second-hand books market where you can find great old books that are otherwise unavailable. Almost every year, I give away a load of books to the university second-hand book sale and I like to think that others are going to enjoy what I once enjoyed. What are you going to do with all the old books on Kindle once you are done with them?

The new Kindle is also very expensive (about $500) and it locks you into only purchasing books that are offered in digital form by Amazon.

“It illustrates how few rights you have when you buy an e-book from Amazon,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for British Telecom and an expert on computer security and commerce. “As a Kindle owner, I’m frustrated. I can’t lend people books and I can’t sell books that I’ve already read, and now it turns out that I can’t even count on still having my books tomorrow.”

Furthermore, because the font size can be changed, there are no page numbers (these being replaced for each page by a numerical range of numbers that did not relate to anything that I could tell) so I cannot cite a specific page of the book. This is a real drawback for academic use since I quote passages from books a lot and like to give the page numbers to readers so that they can see for themselves the full context of the quote.

I think that before eBooks really take off it needs to be the case that the eBook readers should be much cheaper (even free), and should be able to read digital books from any source.

The old-fashioned books have some real advantages. As Lawrence G. Smith, author of Cesare Pavese And America, says (thanks to Progressive Review for the quote):

The book has existed in its present format–essentially sheaves of paper between a binding of some sort–for over two millennia. It has done so because it is a perfect artifact of information technology. It is portable, permanent, nearly indestructible, easily shared. It suffers no damage near magnetic fields, and when opened its boot-up time is instantaneous–just open it and you are reading; close it and reopen and you are reading immediately once again. It uses no electricity and never crashes. When you are reading its pages, they never go blue or black and you never get a message “fatal error; system shutting down.”

Maybe I am just too old fashioned and stuck in my reading ways, the way I continue to subscribe to newspapers. I can see that printing and distributing books, like newspapers, involves enormous costs and a lot of waste since publishers have to guess how many copies to print and how to distribute them. A purely on-demand printing process, where a book is published and bound and sent to the person who ordered it might reduce that.

POST SCRIPT: Bronze age Luddites

Reluctance to adopt new technologies has a long history.

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The fact that the current US system is broken and needs a complete overhaul with government involvement is becoming increasingly apparent to almost anyone except for those who have some kind of visceral reaction to the government being involved in anything. It is because of the stark reality faced by ordinary people that, despite the incessant propaganda against single payer public plans by the health industry and its allies in Congress and the media, the polls are pretty clear that people favor a greater government involvement in the health care system.[Read more…]

It is important to realize that in the single payer or socialized systems, everyone is covered and no one is denied coverage for lack of employment, pre-existing conditions and the like. Does that mean that one will be able to have any treatment that one desires whenever one desires it? Of course not. Whenever there is greater demand than resources available, there will always have to be decisions made as to how those resources are to be utilized, and invariably some treatments may be denied or delayed for some people.

The point is that this occurs even now in the private health insurance system that we have in the US. The difference, and it is a huge one, is that the private health insurance decisions about whom and what to treat are made by bean counters who are driven by the insatiable drive to make profits for their companies and who seek every means to deny treatment. There is almost nothing that ordinary people can do when they get shafted by the companies, because they are expert at giving you the run-around.

In single-payer and socialized medicine, decisions about how to allocate resources are made by collectively by physicians, other health professionals, and public policy makers who try to maximize the benefits of the system with the resources they have. There is usually some kind of board that is responsible for the workings of the system, but unlike the boards of directors of private, profit-seeking health insurance companies, they do not personally benefit financially by limiting treatment. And if we do not like how the system is run, then we have power to change things in that we can either vote to give the system more resources (the way we vote levies for schools and libraries) or we can vote for a government that will make the changes we desire. The public ultimately controls the health care system, which is as it should be.

It is also important to realize that in both single payer and socialized systems that are in existence in other countries, people still have the option to buy private health insurance if they want extra services, so those people who want premium services can still have them.

Those who think that they have good insurance now in the US from the profit-seeking private health insurance companies and resist change towards a single-payer or socialized system might be in for a nasty shock when they actually get ill because the health insurance industry has entire teams of people whose sole job is to find ingenious ways to deny coverage. The US health care system is truly wonderful as long as you do not get sick. Reporter Lisa Girion of the Los Angeles Times of June 17, 2009 reports on how the insurance companies cancel the medical coverage of sick people after they are diagnosed, a practice known as ‘rescission’.

An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations showed that health insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period.

It also found that policyholders with breast cancer, lymphoma and more than 1,000 other conditions were targeted for rescission and that employees were praised in performance reviews for terminating the policies of customers with expensive illnesses.

Denial of coverage is mostly done by using the infamous ‘pre-existing conditions’ loophole. Insurance companies will go to great lengths to dig up something, anything, that can be used to deny claims and cancel coverage altogether. “A Texas nurse said she lost her coverage, after she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, for failing to disclose a visit to a dermatologist for acne… One employee, for instance, received a perfect 5 for “exceptional performance” on an evaluation that noted the employee’s role in dropping thousands of policyholders and avoiding nearly $10 million worth of medical care.”

Michael Moore’s film Sicko (see my review) interviewed people whose job was to do this and get rewarded for it by the insurance companies. This should be no surprise. After all, then president Richard Nixon approved of setting up the present employment based private health insurance system only after he was assured by his aide that “Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit… All the incentives are toward less medical care… the less care they give them, the more money they make… the incentives run the right way.” The present system is running exactly as they envisaged.

In May 2008 my younger daughter graduated from college so she immediately ceased to be on our health plan. But her job started only in August 2008 so we had to go through the dreary business of shopping around to get temporary coverage for the months of June and July before she got on her new company’s plan. That kind of irritation alone should be enough for people to want to ditch the present system in favor of one where coverage is decoupled from one’s employment status. For most people, the biggest nightmare about losing their job, or even changing it, is how to ensure health care for them and their families.

But that’s not all. When my daughter later went to the doctor for some minor treatment, the insurance company would not pay unless she could prove that it was not a ‘pre-existing condition’, which meant that we had to go back and get all the documentation about her two month temporary coverage. Even that was not enough and we had to get the paperwork of the coverage she had before that and submit that too. All this took a lot of time and the matter still has not been resolved. In the meantime she left that job and got a new one, so we don’t know what will happen now. But if she had not taken the precaution of getting temporary coverage for the two-month period of June and July 2008 (which happens to many people between jobs), and if we had not been conscientious about keeping all the paperwork, they would have simply denied her claims and she would have been on the hook for the entire amount. And there is nothing that we could have done about it.

Suzie Madrak relates an awful story about the hassle she went through when she injured her ankle. Because the injury occurred when she fell while getting down from a truck, her health insurance and auto insurance companies kept passing the buck to each other as being the party responsible for paying for treatment. This kind of thing simply would not happen in a single-payer or socialized system.

Anyone who has had to deal with the health insurance companies knows the aggravation that occurs routinely. The funny thing is that most Americans think this is normal because they have never known anything better. People in countries that have single-payer or socialized health systems never have to deal with an profit-making insurance bureaucracy that seeks to make money by denying treatment.

It is important to always bear in mind one undeniable fact: In the current system, it is that the primary mission of the private health insurance industry is to maximize the profits of their shareholders, not to provide good service to sick people.

The fact that finding ways to deny coverage is an important part of their profit-making strategy emerged once again when during congressional hearings last month, Rep. Bart Stupak, the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations asked each of the heads of the major health insurance companies whether he would at least commit his company to immediately stop rescissions except in cases where they could show intentional fraud. All of them said “No”, thus confirming that denying coverage to sick people by any means possible is a deliberate profit-seeking policy of these companies.

Unbelievable.

POST SCRIPT: Bill Maher makes a commercial for the American Medical Association

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Some readers may remember my post on the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation where it is believed that during the communion service, the wafer and wine become the actual body and blood of Jesus. I took that idea to its logical conclusion and argued that if true it could be used to clone god.

The university even sent in armed guards to be present at future services to prevent any more hostages being taken. The Catholic diocese also sent in a team of nuns as added protection for the wafers, though no mention was made as to whether they too were packing heat.

Well, it turns out that when the Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper recently attended a memorial service in a Catholic church for a deceased dignitary, he may committed the same religious offense as the college student. Watch and see for yourself.

I can guess what happened. Non-Catholics are not supposed to receive communion in the Catholic Church. The prime minister is a Protestant and probably realized at the last minute, when he was in a line where everyone was about to be given the wafer by the priest, that he did not know what the proper protocol was to deal with it. Eating it may have been sacrilegious and refusing it or giving it back might have been seen as rude. As a non-Catholic he realized he was in danger of committing a religious faux pas and poor sap, like all politicians faced with a tricky decision, he decided to punt. He probably felt that the safe thing to do was to put it in his pocket and deal with it later, not realizing that what he did was worse than the other options. As one news report on what is being called Wafergate says:

[T]he handling of the host is no trivial matter. As a non-Catholic, the prime minister should probably have refused communion, and church officials should have been advised of this in advance. But once the communion wafer, considered the body of Jesus, was in the prime minister’s hand, it should have been consumed promptly or returned.

Of course, what he should have done when he was called on this was to admit that he had pocketed the wafer out of uncertainty about what to do and simply returned it. Even very religious people realize that their Byzantine rules are not understood by outsiders and would have forgiven him. But again, Harper’s political instincts to never admit a mistake kicked in and he denied pocketing it, deciding to brazen it out.

So he either still has the wafer or he has destroyed it in some way and removed the evidence. There is no word on whether the Mounties or an elite swat team of nuns are going to try and stage a rescue of the hostage wafer from the pockets of this infidel.

If I were Harper’s advisor, I would have suggested that he give the Pope the pocketed wafer and say that he took it because he wanted to give the Pope a special gift, something with more meaning than a typical head of state gift like a painting or vase or an iPod. What could be more special to the Pope than getting a piece of the body of Christ?

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In order to effectively combat the health industry propaganda that seeks to preserve the current terrible system, people need to have a clear idea of what the main issues are and get clear on what the various terms mean.

First of all, ‘universal’ coverage, by which is meant that everyone has access to some health care is not enough. It is possible to achieve this by demanding that everyone must purchase private health insurance (the way all drivers must purchase auto insurance) and then providing aid for those who cannot afford it. All this would do is put more victims in the clutches of the rapacious and inefficient private health insurance companies and increase their profits while not improving the system.[Read more…]

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There is a famous and funny old sketch called the Five Minute University in which comedian Don Novello acts in his character of Father Guido Sarducci.

As he says, when the students study theology at his university, all they will learn are the answers to the two questions “Where is god?” (Answer: God is everywhere) and “Why?” (Answer: Because he likes you). I am beginning to think that the answer to the first question is absolutely correct.

Take a look at this picture of a cut tree stump that is in a churchyard in Ireland. What do you see?

Nothing? Just a tree stump that someone has cut in an odd way? Oh ye of little faith! To the devout this looks like the Virgin Mary and they think its appearance is (what else?) a miracle. People are making pilgrimages to pray around it. Over 2,000 have signed a petition objecting to plans to uproot the stump, and want to convert it into a permanent shrine of some sort.

Such stories, apart from revealing religious people to be hopelessly credulous, also demonstrate how weak some people’s faith is, not how strong. It is only people who are really desperate for a sign to bolster their beliefs that will seize on such pathetic things as validating their faith. The woman who saw the Marmite Jesus ‘took comfort from the image’ saying, “I’m not particularly religious but I like to think it’s Jesus looking out for us.”

This kind of thing puts religious authorities in a quandary. On the one hand, they realize that if you have too many such sightings, religion begins to look more and more ridiculous. After all, if people start worshipping tree stumps, how can you distinguish so-called mainstream religion from more allegedly primitive religions, such as paganism. Some religions actually do involve tree-worship and the Christmas tree symbol itself likely began as one.

On the other hand, religious authorities cannot categorically debunk all of them as nonsense because their bread and butter depends on people believing that god can reveal himself to people on occasion even if it in this weird way. The problem for the church is that it wants to discourage freelancers and keep a monopoly on what qualifies as a revelation of god and what doesn’t as this is the source of their power and money. They tried to walk that fine line on this occasion too.

Local parish priest Fr Willie Russell said on radio station Limerick Live 95FM yesterday that people should not worship the tree. “There’s nothing there . . . it’s just a tree . . . you can’t worship a tree.”

A spokesman for the Limerick diocesan office said the “church’s response to phenomena of this type is one of great scepticism”.

“While we do not wish in any way to detract from devotion to Our Lady, we would also wish to avoid anything which might lead to superstition,” he said.

Fortunately for the spokesman, he was not asked what distinguishes this particular “superstition” from all the superstitions that the church expects people to believe, such as that the wafer and wine become transformed into the actual body and blood of Jesus when the priest mumbles some words over it. Mary-in-a-tree-stump is nothing compared to that.

Fortunately for the spokesman, he could depend on the ‘respect for religion’ nonsense to deter ‘polite’ reporters from asking such obvious questions.

That Mitchell and Webb Look reports on another miraculous sighting.

All these Jesus and Mary sightings and the comment in the above clip that the melon message blew his tomato message out of the water gave me an idea for a new reality TV series, because what the nation really needs is another reality show. This one would consist of people bringing their candidates for an authentic god appearance and making the case for it. Then a panel of theologians would give their comments, and the audience votes for which artifact is an actual miracle of god and then worship the ultimate winner.

I think a good title for the show would be “American Idol”. I hope no one has used it already.

UPDATE: Commenter Chris sent me this compilation of a huge number of Jesus sightings. There seems to be an epidemic.

POST SCRIPT: You mean the Earth isn’t 6,000 years old?

Watch this statement by Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen (R).

What is amazing is that her statement that the Earth is 6,000 years old is said so casually during a discussion of environmental concerns over uranium mining, as if it was the most commonplace fact in the world and not at all something idiotic and controversial. These people live in their own bubble world.

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The late Walter Cronkite said, “America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.” And he was right. It is a rotten structure that has continued purely on the basis of its ability to fool people using smoke and mirrors into thinking it is better than it is. But the structure is so bad that the façade is crumbling and the need for reform cannot be hidden anymore.

As the health care reform debate gathers steam, those who benefit greatly from the current system (drug and health insurance companies, hospitals, and doctors) by making large amounts of money while delivering less than adequate care, and the members of Congress whom they effectively bribe to protect their interests, and the mainstream media which is always obsequious in advancing the interests of the business and political elite, are going flat out to preserve as much of their interests by either lying or fear-mongering or creating confusion. As all the various plans are debated, with their details, it is important to keep clear what the issues are, and the next series of posts will try to do that.

These are the lies and distortion that are spread by the health industry:

The US currently has the best health care system in the world.

The private sector is better than the government at providing everything, including health care.

Single payer or socialized systems are massive, complicated, expensive, bureaucratic nightmares that will not provide timely and quality health care.

There is no freedom of choice under single payer or socialized medicine.

The people in those countries that have single-payer health care systems (which is practically every other developed country and many developing countries) have terrible care and the people in those countries envy what we have in the US.

Expect to hear lots of frightening stories about how terrible single payer and socialized medicine is (although exactly how those plans work will be rarely explained and comparative statistics will rarely be produced) and how strange and confusing it will be for everyone. Expect to hear a lot of anecdotes about the long wait times that the people in those systems encounter. If you want to get the facts about single payer to counter this propaganda, see this FAQ page prepared by the group Physicians for A National Health Program (PNHP).

During all these discussions, the key question that will be avoided at all costs is what value the private health insurance industry adds to the health system. This is because the answer is zero. It is actually more accurate to say it is negative, because these companies are parasites, existing purely to take money out of the system in the form of high bureaucratic costs and profits. Currently the amount of money that is siphoned off by them is estimated at 30% of the total health care budget, far higher than the overhead costs in single payer systems.

All these special interests will try and avoid even mentioning the phrase ‘single payer’ and refuse to even consider it as one of the options. In fact it is only because advocates have loudly demanded that it be included, to the extent of even disrupting meetings and hearings and getting themselves arrested, that it has had any mention at all.

The only alternative that will be deemed to be even worth discussing is something called a ‘public option’. Every effort will be made to make even this clumsy and cumbersome, so as to make the present system look good in comparison and thus preserve the profits of the health industry and confuse the public that this is how single-payer or socialized medicine works.

Last month, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich described how ‘Big Pharma’ (the large drug companies) is planning to kill even this limited public option, let alone single payer.

I’ve poked around Washington today, talking with friends on the Hill who confirm the worst: Big Pharma and Big Insurance are gaining ground in their campaign to kill the public option in the emerging health care bill.

You know why, of course. They don’t want a public option that would compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to negotiate better rates with drug companies. They argue that would be unfair. Unfair? Unfair to give more people better health care at lower cost? To Pharma and Insurance, “unfair” is anything that undermines their profits.

So they’re pulling out all the stops — pushing Democrats and a handful of so-called “moderate” Republicans who say they’re in favor of a public option to support legislation that would include it in name only. One of their proposals is to break up the public option into small pieces under multiple regional third-party administrators that would have little or no bargaining leverage. A second is to give the public option to the states where Big Pharma and Big Insurance can easily buy off legislators and officials, as they’ve been doing for years. A third is bind the public plan to the same rules private insurers have already wangled, thereby making it impossible for the public plan to put competitive pressure on the insurers.

But Big Pharma is just one player opposing any meaningful reform. Allied with it are all the other parasites getting rich off the misery of sick people, and their allies and sycophants and enablers in Congress and the media.

Next in the series: Combating the health industry propaganda.

POST SCRIPT: Walter Cronkite

In the wake of the death last week of legendary newsman Walter Cronkite, the current media has rightly eulogized him as representing some of the best elements of journalism. In a terrific essay, Glenn Greenwald notes how the media praise people like Cronkite and David Halberstam after they die, and bask in their reflected glory, while carefully avoiding adopting the very practices that made them exceptional journalists.

The essay is too good to excerpt. You should really read the whole thing.